Our ordinary days
A golden summer moment at Amy’s home in Winnweiler, Germany, August 2005
“Summer weather, like being in love, is a philosopher’s stone which turns our ordinary days to gold. But not the whole day… For it is never the whole day, never all our life which is transformed in any happiness, but only the exquisite moments.” — Nan Fairbrother
More than any other season, summer seems to promise more than it can deliver. We exit springtime with all sorts of ambitious notions about what we’ll do, see and accomplish during the long hours of sunlight. We’ll have time for fun reading. Picnics and maybe trips to the beach. Tending the lawn or garden; maybe growing tomatoes? Getting that garage or closet cleaned out, once and for all. Perhaps some lazy mornings sleeping in.
As July draws to a close, most of us look back on the past eight weeks with amazement, wondering where it went and what became of our plans. The delightful warmth of early June has become the sweltering heat of August, our petunias are beginning to fade or grow leggy, and the back-to-school advertisements catch us off guard. Already?! But it feels as if summer just began…
Despite its ephemeral presence, summer almost always leaves us a new cache of memories to keep and treasure. Such fleeting moments are fitting symbols of the summer itself, which shares their brevity. As the summer begins to wane, I hope you can look back and find some exquisite moments to remember, when the magic of summer’s alchemy turned the ordinary to gold. If you have none so far, you have a few weeks left to discover some. Happy treasure hunting!
This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
Defeat Despair 
What a great shot of you, joy written on your face!
Thank you, Mary Ann. That was one sweet doggie (Dreyfuss was his name). He made it very easy to smile and feel happy!
Mmmmmmmmm!
Summer mornings so golden you can almost taste it! Maybe taste is the wrong word. But there’s something that so infuses our senses that I can’t think of a sensory word large enough to describe it.
Touching those moments and storing them in my memory certainly feeds my soul almost as wholesome food feeds my body.
Maybe that’s why I picked “taste”!
Susan, I think it is a very apt verb to use in the context. In fact, if I had to “assign” one sensory experience to each season, I would say that we taste the fruits of summer, we smell the crisp scents of autumn, we feel cold of winter and we see the dazzling colors of springtime. And I suppose that we hear the unique sounds of each season; in terms of auditory experience, no one season seems more obvious than the others.
Very true. This morning I hear birds in the most summer-businesslike way!
It’s amazing how much expression one can hear in birdsong, isn’t it?